In today’s world, customers have become more and more powerful during the buying process. It is critical for marketing and sales teams to work together to appeal to people early in the buying cycle and deliver a great customer experience for their customers when they are ready to purchase. Eloqua provides us a simple and easy qualification process to approach the right customer at the right time by automatically qualifying leads based on their demographic and behavioral characteristics that matter to your business. That is lead scoring. This article will walk you through how to begin thinking about what is important in your customer qualification, and give you the tools to know when to reach out based on the lead scoring system you create.

So, how does lead scoring work in Eloqua?

There are two dimensions about lead scoring: profile and engagement.

The profile score depends on the explicit data of an account such as job role, industry, revenue and so on. The profile score will help you better identify prospects that are in your target audience. Eloqua’s system will give your prospects a score of A, B, C or D. To simplify, the score will tell you if the prospect is the right fit or not, with A being the best fit.

The engagement score depends on the implicit data such as the people that have visited your website or opened your newsletters/emails, which determines their level of interest. Prospects are given a score that ranges from 1-4 with 1 being the highest.

Eloqua will combine these two scores together and produce a final lead score. For example: A4 or D1. Now let’s take a closer look of these scores: A4 is the right prospect to reach out to, however, the interest level is lowest. To further nurture this potential opportunity, we may need to send out more information to evoke interest. On the other hand, when you see a contact’s score is D1, the person has a high interest level, however, the person is not in your target audience. Doing some further investigation might be warranted to verify your data is correct on their profile, but make sure to prioritize the people you have selected as better fits for your company.

Where do you start?

Start with a conversation between sales and marketing.

Lead scoring is not a solo play. Marketing efforts will attract the potential audience and the goal is to increase their interest over time, but eventually your sales team will need to contact these people depending on how customers act against the marketing activities you have in place. The two teams need to discuss a comprehensive standard when deciding what factors should be considered in each team’s engagement based off of the customer experience.

Set up the lead scoring model in Eloqua

Go to Eloqua, click audience and choose Lead Scoring. From the two options, select ‘Create a Model’. Change the name on the top left.

On the top of the editing page, you can see there are two tabs called “Profile” and “Engagement”. On the left of this page, there is a panel contains all kinds of criteria.

Let’s begin with the profile portion. You can choose the criteria from different sections by clicking the drop box on the top left.

Drag or double click the criteria you need. In the example below, I chose job roles, industry and annual revenue. As a best practice, we recommend 3 to 5 criteria.

Weight the criteria based on their importance. The more important the criteria is, the higher the percentage it should be. The remaining percentage will be shown at the right bottom.

Add value to the criteria. The closer the value is to the ideal lead the more points the value should be assigned. Double click the criteria to add roles. In this example, the higher the person’s job role is within their company, the better. Based on that, we assign different percentages to these job roles. Keep adding other roles for industry and annual revenue.

Configuring the engagement portion is pretty similar. Simply select the criteria on the left. When choosing these criteria, in order to better determine the interest/engagement level, you should think about frequency and recency at the same time. You should choose activities that are good indicators someone might buy. Just as an example, I chose opened email, visited landing page and submitted form. Follow the same steps as you did in the profile portion to give these criteria weights and rules.

You need to set up all the rules for each criteria in this lead scoring model.

Change the threshold for each score to decide the standards for each score to reach. Click the “>>” on the top right, then click “settings”, and adjust the threshold based on your needs.

Now, you are ready to activate your lead scoring model! Click the “>>” on the top right, and activate.

Setting the original lead scoring model is definitely not the end of the lead qualification process. Don’t forget to keep revising the criteria when you have a deeper understanding of your sales or have more data collected from your marketing. Lead scoring should be a living model and grow together with your business.

Have you ever being involved in a project where you had to develop a script and suddenly you lose track of how many versions you have? Or how about a time when you were almost finished with your project and suddenly your computer died and your changes were not saved? Well, in this article we will be discussing a few best practices for developers that will help you solve some of these problems. My name is Ricardo A. Chavez, and I am currently a Senior Software Engineer here at SFCG and have been for about 4 years. During this time I have come to learn some coding tricks that will help any developer make their code and scripts easier to understand. My learning experience also involved some best practices that any developer should follow in order to make their work experience the best one. Below I will share three best practices that I follow every time I am developing a new application for any of our clients.

Use a Good Developer Tool

Your biggest weapon when developing a script or project is to use a good developer tool. They are software specifically designed to help developers write code in different languages. There are some built specifically for a single programming language like C#, but most of them are multi-purpose, being able to process several languages like PHP, HTML, Javascript, etc. I have found out throughout my years as a developer that the best and easiest tool to understand and use is NetBeans. It allows for easy and efficient project management, highlights places where there might be bugs or errors, and allows you to write applications in several programming languages. If there is a tool you were looking for, this is the one!

Always Save Your Code

You would not believe how many times I have been writing code on my laptop when suddenly something might make it crash or shut down. At this point the whole project will be lost and the need to start from scratch will arise. A good practice is to always save your code whenever you finish a small piece of logic. This could be a function, a loop, or just some comments about what your logic will do. A good practice is to also save a “master version” of your code that will be used in case you might need to revert to a previous version.

Backup Your Project

This is the big one. Let’s say that you are working on your project, you finished it, you tested it, and everything works great so you push it to production and everything is right. Then suddenly the server where your code is hosted might crash and all your hard work is deleted without you being able to recover it. It is then that you realize your code was not backed up and there is no way for you to get it back. A good practice is to also save your code locally, however what would happen if your laptop/computer suddenly crashed and you have to delete your hard drive and install a new one? This is where websites such as BitBucket come in handy. This is a site where you can create repositories, upload your different script versions, download and copy previous projects and best of all, all of your stuff will be private meaning that only you will have access to your projects. Having a website where you can back up all your scripts is a good way of preventing situations as the example described at the beginning.

Communicate

This is habitually something that developers have trouble with. Most of the time, developers will let someone know when they start a project and once it is done. That is only two times that they communicated with someone, however this is one of the most important practices that need to be used. Clients are usually happy when they are given progress reports of the app they requested, and at the same time, your team members' work will be easier to manage if they know at what stage of development you are. A good practice is to communicate with your clients at least twice a week and let them know what the status of their app is while also communicating with your team members about any potential roadblocks, updates, progress, etc, on a daily basis. This way you will be able to make sure expectations are set and everyone is on the same page to ensure a good project,

These are only a few of the best practices recommended for developers, but they are the ones I apply every time I am building something for our clients. This way you will never lose track of how many versiosn you might have or worry about your code reverting to a previous version and you having to build it from scratch. Your clients can rest assured that their app will always be available and that they would have the latest and best version of it.

We all know that Oracle Eloqua's campaign canvas is an easy tool to manage a multi-step campaign, however, what if there is a series of events under the same topic? Or, if you have recurring events happening at different times and different locations? Let’s take a break and think about that process using campaign canvas

Assuming we want to promote our new product in ten cities across the country, we would need to set up 10 campaigns in campaign canvas. Thinking about all of the assets, each one would then need a landing page, a form, and an average of 3-5 emails. If we have ten sessions (meaning ten campaigns), we would need 10 landing pages, 10 forms, and possibly 50 emails! Monitoring and/or manually updating the attendees once they interact with that campaign also takes time. Not to mention if there is limited access and you would like to set up a waiting list. Think about all of resources needed to make that happen.

As you can see, it can be a very effective process, but tedious at the same time.

The Eloqua Events module is the perfect solution for those looking to get the same results with less effort. Let’s take a look:

First, navigate to Eloqua, Orchestration, Tools, Events.

Click Events on the top left and open a new event registration:

Name the event and fill out the information. As you can see here, in the event module, we have four sections: Event Overview, Registrant Info, Event Details and Event Actions. Let’s look closely at each of them:

Event Overview

In this section, you can see the name and description of the event, view the number of registrants, and manually manage their status.

Registrant Info

In this section, you link your Eloqua enrollment form and configure the field mapping between events and form.

Event Details

In this section, you will fill out all the information you need to show in your communication emails such as date, time, topic, and access code. All of the fields in this section can be field-merged in emails.

Event Action

In this section, you will need to configure which actions should be triggered under certain circumstances. For example, you can send out a reminder email for your event one day before the date it will be held. You can even manage a waiting list in this section should it be applicable.

Again, while campaign canvas is an amazing tool, the events module in Eloqua can make the planning of any event a breeze. If you are interested in learning more about the Events module, email info@sfcg.com. We are more than happy to help you!